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Comment by jkn | Hacker News Reader

The Data Liberation Front team was formed at Google in 2007, and released Google Takeout in 2011, worldwide, well before the other big companies had anything similar in place.

http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2011/06/data-liberation-f...

For more up-to-date information see the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front#c...

This service works quite well, I'm using it to backup the whole of my Google data every few months, including Gmail, Photos and Drive.

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To be fair, Apple has for the longest time allowed export of contacts (.vcard), calendar items (.ics), photos (several formats), music (except for music purchased in the iTunes store for some time that was DRMd), mailboxes, etc.

While I feel locked in to an extent because I don't want to give up macOS/iOS/watchOS and their integration, I never felt that my data was locked up with Apple.

Apple Notes is different. Notes stored in iCloud (default for iOS & macOS) are stored in a fairly inaccessible local database. They cannot be exported to any format other than single notes as PDFs. The service offers no public API.

Although you can transfer them to any IMAP enabled service, and then export them (emails essentially) however you want

It's different.

Google Takeout was/is a nice user feature. Google is not required to pass all of user's data.

GDPR compliance is different, companies are required to pass basically a database dump by law.

How is that relevant? If anything, that actually goes to show the point being made, which is that Google had this available everywhere before GDPR even existed. Most other companies, including Apple, are only doing this because they have to in Europe, whereas Google did it arguably for better reasons.

The GDPR was wonderful. One of the websites I use had an export option but it only gave some of the data which didn't include the bit I wanted and then the GDPR came along and now I get a CSV dump of every table for my user.

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